PJ Harvey – ‘Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea’
Following her hypnotic fourth album, Is This Desire?, PJ Harvey released Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea. After several albums influenced by darkness and heartbreak, Harvey’s fifth effort takes a slighter lighter tone, with songs celebrating love and hopefulness. That’s not to say the record is all positive – Harvey also injects tales of violence and corruption into the narrative, exploring life’s many dichotomies.
Speaking to Q, Harvey explained: “I thought, No, I want absolute beauty. I want this album to sing and fly and be full of reverb and lush layers of melody. I want it to be my beautiful, sumptuous, lovely piece of work.” The result is a record where Harvey sounds free from all restraint, moving through delicate harmonies and moments of passionate abrasion, carried across from earlier records like Rid of Me. However, none of the tracks sound as though they could’ve been pulled from an earlier release. Rather, these earlier influences morph into something completely new, highlighting Harvey’s resistance to complacency.
The first track, ‘Big Exit’, contrasts city paranoia with carefree love, with Harvey commenting on the gun violence she was exposed to while visiting New York. With lines like “Feels like the end of the world” and “I’m scared baby/ I wanna run/ This world’s crazy”, Harvey paints a doom-filled picture. Yet, she then offers up more hope, as she sings: “Ain’t it true/I’m immortal/ When I’m with you”. Harvey’s voice is slightly strained as she shouts over a prominent riff during each verse before allowing her gorgeously melodic vocal abilities to take over for the choruses. Subsequently, the track sets the tone for the record, pitting hope and despair alongside each other, blurring the lines between black and white.
On ‘Good Fortune’, Harvey channels her inner Patti Smith as she sings over a steady beat. It’s an intoxicating track and one that you can’t help but find yourself singing along to. Harvey’s optimism continues with words like “Things I once thought/ Unbelievable/ In my life/ Have all taken place” illuminating the hopeful sheen that clouds over us during the early stages of love. Similarly, on ‘One Line’, Harvey wants to protect herself and her lover from the outside world’s terror. “This world all gone to war/ All I need is you tonight,” she lilts over mesmerising backing vocals that remain almost constant throughout, whirling around with an angelic quality as though another version of Harvey is watching down on herself and her lover.
The singer’s voice continues to shine on ‘Beautiful Feeling’, a muted track lifted by Thom Yorke’s haunting backing vocals. With sparse electric guitar played in deep, desolate tones providing the only accompaniment to the pair’s voices, their vocals become additional instrumentation. Simple lyricism allows Harvey to convey her intense desire for the subject of the song, preferring the richness of her voice to convey her passion. Yorke also joins the musician for ‘This Mess We’re In’, with the Radiohead frontman taking the lead while Harvey predominantly adds spoken elements in a sophisticated cadence. The song is one of the album’s highlights, with the male/female vocals aiding the record’s merging of contrasts.
Although Harvey once asserted that Songs From The City, Songs From The Sea is not her “New York album”, she does a fine job of describing the city. Tracks like ‘You Said Something’ illuminate Harvey’s storytelling abilities; you can picture the singer and her lover on a Manhatten rooftop, the lights of the city shining over them in the dark of night. By describing the scene in minute detail, Harvey freezes a moment of pure love and enjoyment in time, enhancing the memory with sights and sounds.
The album quickly picks up the pace with the biting ‘Kamikaze’, which rattles away with a furious drum beat that rarely allows the listener a pause for breath. Bearing the simultaneous influence of punk and jungle, the song is one of the album’s most piercing, earth-shattering moments, with Harvey’s voice twisting into an almost glam rock-esque inflexion as she sings the song’s title.
Love continues to flourish on the aptly titled ‘This Is Love’, led by driving guitars. So enamoured by her lover, Harvey cannot comprehend why life must be “so complex”; all she wants to do is “sit here and watch you undress”. However, the playfully seductive track is soon contrasted by ‘Horses In My Dreams’, a song Harvey once described as “a very difficult, emotional thing” to write. Providing the album with one of its more introspective, downbeat moments, it also feels like a potent moment of clarity and freedom, with Harvey repeating, “I have pulled myself clear” like an affirmation.
Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea remains one of Harvey’s greatest records, demonstrating a powerful knack for evocative lyricism in tandem with her stunning voice, which she wields with varying strength to aid her words. Thematically, the record wavers between hopefulness and an awareness of society’s innate corruption. For Harvey, love and the quest for freedom make life’s despair bearable. Sonically, Harvey keeps the record interesting by moving between sparse, singular tracks and expansive pop-infused structures. Never faltering, Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea is just one example of Harvey’s enduring brilliance.
